The Colossal Strangeness of China’s Most Excellent Tourist City

By Jody Rosen

March 6, 2015

Ordos, like so many of the country’s hundreds of new towns, is famous for being empty — a symbol, some would say, of the hubris of rampant urbanization. But the few people who live there see it differently.

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Two schoolgirls gazing out to Kangbashi New Area, formerly farmland and now the showpiece district of Ordos City, in the Inner Mongolia region of China.

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ORDOS, A MAGICAL LAND in the just north of China, is a dazzling pearl in the world history and culture. That’s what it says — verbatim, in ungrammatical English — on a plaque that greets you as you enter a rotunda in the Ordos Museum. The city of Ordos sits in a coal-rich wilderness of desert and grassland at the southwestern edge of the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. It is not even 15 years old and has a minuscule population compared to most Chinese cities. But those facts have not constrained Ordos’s municipal rhetoric. In the museum’s exhibition devoted to Genghis Khan you are told that when the great warrior traveled through in the early 13th century, he praised Ordos as a paradise, an ideal home for both children and old people, with a natural landscape of unrivaled beauty. Signs welcome visitors to “the famous tourist city,” “the most excellent tourist city” and “the top tourist city in China.” The word Ordos itself is a kind of boast: In Mongolian, it means “many palaces.”

The outside world has come to know Ordos by a different title: as a ghost city. In recent years, Ordos has emerged as the most famous, and most infamous, of China’s overbuilt and underpopulated instant cities — a would-be “Dubai on the Steppe,” designed to accommodate hundreds of thousands of residents but home to comically few. Internet slide shows and international television crews have captured scenes of skyscrapers and statues looming over empty streets, and pundits have seized on Ordos as a metaphor for the hubris and folly of China’s rampant urbanization.

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A carousel swing ride in the plaza of a waterfront development in Kangbashi.CreditWeng Fen

It is true that China is in the throes of a transformation without analogue or precedent. Experts say that in the next two decades, hundreds of millions of rural Chinese will move into hundreds of newly built cities — the biggest building boom, and the largest migration, in human history. Last March, China’s State Council and the Central Committee of the Communist Party released a report, the “National New-Type Urbanization Plan,” announcing the government’s intention to boost the proportion of the nation’s population living in cities to 60 percent by 2020. To meet that goal, China will need to bring 100 million new residents to cities over the next five years. The estimated cost of the plan is $6.8 trillion.

Ordos, in other words, is not exactly unique: Everywhere in China, new cities are springing up and spreading out over recently paved countryside. What makes Ordos a special case are the mineral deposits beneath it. The land surrounding Ordos City sits on one-sixth of China’s coal reserves. In the early 2000s, China began awarding mining rights to private companies, which generated massive tax revenues, swelling municipal coffers. The government poured much of that windfall into the development of a monumental new district, Kangbashi New Area; hundreds of millions of dollars in capital investment flowed in, spurring a construction boom on a staggering scale. The cycle that was unleashed is familiar: speculation and debt, boom and bust, a real-estate bubble that burst cataclysmically amid downturns in the volatile coal market.

Today, the real-estate situation in Ordos has turned macabre. Video billboards along the city’s major roadways display mug shots of fugitive developers who have skipped town, fleeing their debts. There are rumors about the dynamiting of buildings in Kangbashi: about owners of unoccupied apartment towers who hope to create value through destruction, reselling freshly cleared land to new investors. To the extent that “the famous tourist city” attracts sightseers, they are the morbidly curious, who pilgrimage to Ordos to experience its eeriness. What they find there, though, may come as a surprise. In the shadows of the deserted construction sites and vacant hotels, there are people. They are the citizens of Ordos — not the inhabitants of a ghost town, but the pioneers of a novel kind of 21st-century urban life.

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One of the many grand architectural statements in Ordos (meaning "many palaces" in Mongolian): a newly built stadium, which will play host to this year's Ethnic Games, a kind of Olympics for China's minority groups.CreditWeng Fen

FOR THE NEWLY ARRIVED visitor, the most shocking thing about Ordos may be its cleanliness. On a mild, overcast day this past autumn, the sleek steel-and-glass terminal at Ejin Horo Airport gave off the gleam of a model kitchen at a high-end department store. The city’s impeccably landscaped roadways were equally pristine. In fact, the first human beings spotted on a taxi ride from the airport into the center of Ordos weren’t pedestrians — there were few of those — but municipal cleaning crews, tidying the sidewalks and broad, multilane thoroughfares. It was an absurdist scene worthy of Ionesco or Beckett: corps of street sweepers pushing brooms on streets that didn’t need to be swept. The closest thing to litter in Ordos is the sand that is now and then whipped up by winds in the surrounding desert and blown into town.

The scale of that town is cartoon-ishly huge. The dimensions of its plazas, the width of its roads, the square footage of its municipal and residential buildings — everything in Ordos seems like it has been attached to a helium pump and inflated to gargantuan size. In Kangbashi, there are dozens of apartment towers and hotels, many reaching 15 stories high, with looping circular drives and sweeping lobbies. The Ordos Museum is a mammoth blob that owes something to Frank Gehry; next door, there’s an enormous library designed to look like books stacked on a shelf. The population of Inner Mongolia is not very Mongolian: There are about four times as many Han Chinese as there are citizens of Mongol extraction. But in Kangbashi, the government has built a kind of Mongolian Disneyland, a city packed with kitsch monuments that evoke the heritage and heroism of life on the steppes. There is a theater shaped like a gigantic yurt; there are streetlamps that take the form of bows and arrows. Everywhere you look, there are horses: murals of Mongol warriors on horseback, a suspension bridge with stanchions in the shape of stallions’ manes. The biggest statue in town shows a pair of massive horses rearing up on their hind legs, each as tall as a small New York tenement building.

Images of this architectural excess, circulated on the Internet, have captured the imagination of the outside world. What these photos omit are the people who inhabit the cityscape. On a blustery afternoon in Kangbashi not long ago, groups of men and women in their teens and early 20s gathered on the steps of the museum and the library, and in the adjacent plaza. Some rode skateboards; a group of kids played basketball on a court just outside the library. The dress code was the same that you see across urban East Asia: lots of brand-name sneakers, hooded sweatshirts and other totems of Western culture. A girl of about 13 arrived on a mountain bike, wearing a baseball cap that read “Chris Brown.” (The R&B star, she explained in English, is her favorite musician.) A little while later, a car came past, blaring slogans and music through a roof-mounted megaphone: a mobile advertisement for Ordos’s newest supermarket. The announcer touted the market’s fresh produce and invoked “Big Big,” a popular nickname for China’s President, Xi Jinping. The soundtrack was the theme music from “Dallas,” the 1980s TV hit.

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A cluster of new apartment buildings, mostly unoccupied.CreditWeng Fen

Nearby, seated outside the library, were a group of five young women, all 19. Two were Mongolian and three were Han Chinese; all of them had come to Ordos from small villages in Inner Mongolia to attend Beijing Normal University, which has opened a Kangbashi branch. “It’s nice here,” said one of the women. “My hometown is a tiny place in the grassland. The people here are more well educated. There’s so much more to do here.” What is there to do in Ordos? “I hang out with my friends. We study at the library. We go to the mall.”

The mall, in this case, is a five-story building that looms over a parking lot in central Kangbashi. It is essentially a big food court, clustered around a central atrium, with dozens of small restaurants serving regional cuisines from all over China, as well as some Western fast food, like ice cream and pizza. That afternoon, the mall’s eateries were crammed. When the sun set, the action shifted to the parking lot, where groups gathered to socialize, and young men sold electronic dance music CDs out of car trunks ringed with LED lights. Later, many of the parking-lot revelers migrated to downtown Kangbashi’s signature evening entertainment: the “fountain show,” a synchronized display of gushing water, flashing lights and bombastic New Age music. It is billed as Asia’s largest such show, and it looks it: The dozens of geysers are arrayed in a vast reflecting pool that stretches the length of three football fields.

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A statue of two stallions outside the entrance to the government headquarters in Kangbashi — one of many public artworks that pay tribute to Ordos's Mongolian past.CreditWeng Fen

IN SHORT, ORDOS is not empty, but it is odd: part windswept frontier outpost, part demented college town, with the vague mirage of another tacky desert colony, Las Vegas, shimmering in the strobe-lit mist of those fountains. It is unclear exactly how many people live in the city; the government is cagey about the question, and the figures they release are unreliable. But close observers of Ordos insist the numbers are on the rise. The filmmakers Adam Smith and Song Ting spent two years shooting “The Land of Many Palaces,” a feature documentary about Ordos and its citizens, which debuted in January. They contend that the population increased markedly during the years that they made the movie, between 2012-14, and estimate that about 100,000 currently live in the city.

That growth is due in large part to old-fashioned Chinese social engineering: an aggressive top-down effort to populate sparsely settled Kangbashi. In 2006, the headquarters of the local government was moved to Kangbashi from the Dongsheng District, 20 miles north; bus service between Kangbashi and Dongsheng was allegedly cut off so that Ordos’s public officials would be forced to take up residence in the new town. Some of the region’s best schools, including a high school, were also relocated to Kangbashi. Today, some vacant apartment buildings have become makeshift dormitories, home to teenage squatters whose parents couldn’t afford to move but wanted their children to attend the new district’s schools.

On the north side of Kangbashi, the result of a different sort of social engineering can be seen. There, a population of largely middle-aged and elderly residents occupy a cluster of high-rise apartment towers that are arranged on a grid of hilly roads. The area is not genteel. There is little in the way of landscaping, and the few shops, set back from the streets in small strip malls, have a grubby, weather-beaten look. But the place does feel like a neighborhood. The residents sit outside the buildings, joking and gossiping. On the narrow sidewalks and in front of the shops, groups gather to play cards and mah-jongg.

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The perfectly landscaped expressway that connects Ordos's old and new cities, both developed this centuryCreditWeng Fen

These people are new citizens of Kangbashi, but they are not quite arrivistes. Nearly all are former farmers whose lands were purchased by the government, which persuaded them to move to apartment buildings in the new town. A half-century ago, in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, China exiled privileged urban youths “down to the countryside,” forcibly turning city dwellers into rustics. In Ordos today, peasants have been deployed to activate the city that has claimed their old pastoral homesteads.

As you wander around Kangbashi, you catch the surreal flavor of these residents’ transformed lives. One day, I spent a few hours in a place called the Ordos Marriage Celebration Cultural Park — the kitschiest attraction in Kangbashi, which is no small distinction. Billed as “China’s first open topic park integrating culture, arts and recreation aimed to exhibit the ‘Ordos Marriage,’ ” it is a sprawling network of sculpture gardens devoted to the themes of romance and wedlock. Visitors can stroll through the Marriagable Age Square, Love Tree Square and the Chinese Traditional Love Culture Zone. There are gardens devoted to the Chinese and Western zodiacs; there are dozens of statues of hearts. Scattered throughout the garden are a series of grandiose tableaux depicting scenes from a courtship and wedding in the grasslands — hulking statues of Mongols and yurts and, of course, horses.

There are real-life horses in Marriage Celebration Cultural Park, too: a pair of them, hitched to carriages of the fancy old-fashioned gilded sort that the British royal family rides in parades. Visitors can hire the carriages for a romantic spin through the gardens. But on that day, there were no takers. The horses stood stone still in a circular path near the park entrance, looking rather less lively than their sculptural counterparts.

Nearby, a half-dozen carriage drivers sat on benches. They were middle-aged men in their 40s and 50s. All of them were former farmers who now lived in apartment towers on the north side of Kangbashi. No one had shown up looking for a carriage ride that week, they told me. In fact, they’d had just a couple of customers in the past month. “It is the slow season,” said one of the drivers with a shrug. It didn’t matter much: With or without business, the government-run tourist office paid their salaries. Even in the “busy season,” they confessed, their eight-hour-long shifts were mostly spent sitting around and talking.

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The Ordos art museum, with its futuristic silhouette.CreditWeng Fen

Economists and urban planners remain divided about whether Ordos will ever populate sufficiently to feel like a “real city.” But the carriage drivers agreed: Urban living was good, and their lot now was far better than it had been when they tilled the hard Inner Mongolian earth. I asked the men where they had lived before moving to their apartments in Kangbashi. One of them, a 56-year-old man named Li Yonh Xiang, spoke up. “I lived here,” he said.

Li had been born and raised just steps from the bench where he was sitting. About half of the 90-acre park had belonged to his family; the government bought the land in 2000. “When we were peasants, we lived according to the weather,” Li said. “Now I live in a heated building with six floors. The city is very nice. There are many cars and buildings, but the air is very clean.”

He said: “Sometimes I miss the old days — the farm, the nature. But it’s easy to picture it the way it was.” He pointed toward the horse-drawn carriages. “Our fields were here. We grew potatoes and corn and other things. Our house” — he nodded toward the park entrance, framed by a garish arch, studded with red and gold hearts — “was right there.” Is Ordos a ghost city? Not exactly. But for some, it’s a city of ghosts.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 146 of T Magazine with the headline: The Colossal Strangeness of China’s Most Excellent Tourist City. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe